Written for stainofmylove's prompt on LJ: 'this is your life'.
Disclaimer: I don't own Gossip Girl or any of its respective characters.
This is the last time that time ends on a champagne-sweet-and-sour note for you and there'll always be another moment for him where time will stop running when he catches your name in luminous cell-screen spotlight.
Nothing carnal or libidinous. It feels as unfamiliar as the bite of diamond and metal snapped around your ring finger.
It's a pretty link in the chain. The girls envy you for it. Isn't Louis' taste exquisite?
Aren't those adjectives lovely?
This is your life. It's going to be.
It will be, you think, when your second amaretto hits its spot so that fairy lights and crystal chandeliers and the tinkle of polite applause and the hilt of his sloe-eyed gaze brush along and whir together into that gorgeous world cradled in your personal snow-globe.
You try not to think of the snow. You've read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for English class, once upon a time when it didn't matter.
He's stopped leaving you missed calls, texts, and e-mails, and sometimes you think you'll be happier without the stickiness that comes with the mess of each loose end. Sometimes you find yourself rummaging through the thumbed-down piles of books in those second-hand stores you never thought princesses might run ever to, in case of an avalanche. Sometimes you wonder how long before you'll be used to the quiet.
The one thing that's constant is the one thing that's an unpolished, blemished memento of how long it took to get where you are today: your cellphone, flipped open to its usual feeding ground so that you're ready to fight or fly your way through the first rumor that spurts from a known vein of trouble.
You find yourself waiting for it at the most inconvenient times: a dress-fitting, a dinner, an impromptu press conference. You wait for that awful name to appear, accompanied by a picture of him and a pretty indie-poet wearing worn-through jeans and a scarf round her slender neck.
You always dread it.
You hate him for it. You hate yourself more for allowing yourself that one privilege.
You hate that it drives you to places you've never wanted to revisit, especially the hutch he's gone and burrowed into for the winter. The elevator creaks in time with the twists that have your chest about to tear itself apart and your secrets bleeding out for nobody to see. And when he opens the door, takes you in with those familiar brown eyes wide open with questions, you press your lips to his with a raging, manic ache that you hope he feels right to the bottom of his core.
Prying eyes be damned, you want this to burn to ashes that'll scatter away with the storm that's has you by the heart. He smells sweet, musky, heady with the sleep that comes from fitful nights spent half awake and brooding.
The dress you wear cost a small fortune at a boutique in Paris and you want it off. Now. You want it pooled at your feet, a puddle of plum silk, the cocoon you've been trying to contain yourself in. And when he does, you feel bare and freer than you've felt in weeks, like you've split the seven skins you've always known and are ready to fly.
But he has you pinned to his bed, anchored to the creases in his sheets and the throbbing approach of tomorrow, tomorrow, when you're supposed to pick up all the pieces you left on the floor and remember gravity.
So you don't.
You forget.
You believe.
You fly with a wing trailing along a sea of glass which you don't look down at because it's only you you see. Alone.
And then in a flutter of kisses, when you're sure you've had the life thrust out of you, when you're sliding along after the crash of your hips to his one last time, it's over.
The spell breaks and you're just a princess again.
Somehow, you're okay for a patched-up loser swaddled in velvet and ermine. The wine is vintage, so is the dress, the necklace belonged to Louis' grandmother. This dinner is going wonderfully well, the men in shiny tuxes and soft white gloves, the ladies charming and well-spoken. Just like in the movies.
Maybe it has to do with the view from your head, where you find yourself watching the revelry from the seat closest to the screen, back when you actually loved the idea of being a part of that glimmering, unreal, technicolor world. It all goes wrong when you twist about your seat with the perfect comment to wipe the laughingly condescending smirk off his face, when you do turn and notice it's the wrong face in the wrong place at the right time.
You put it down to nerves, excitement at the notion of times like this weaving themselves into the stream of your life. Louis' mother pats your hand with what you know isn't a knowing smile. Princes don't smirk and glass slippers can't ever be returned on time to that perfect fit.
The only clue from Gossip Girl is the image of Dan Humphrey wandering along Sterling Place with a frown on his face and a simpering date on his arm.
You don't care how your phone shatters to pieces as you hurl it across the room, in to the nearest wall.
This is your life. This is your day.
You are beautiful. Everyone agrees.
You do not drink anything to calm yourself. It's easier when you know what's coming, that you have what you ask for.
This is your moment. You know what to make of it.
Even your mother is proud.
Since when did you know what was best for yourself, anyway?
You don't answer that question. You pick up your new phone, turn it off, and slide into the shoes you had custom-made.
As you prepare to leave after the bride's maids and flower-girls, it rings.
And like you always do, you walk away to the night.